4 Ways HRMS Can Make Onboarding a Walk in the Park

8th January 2014

Does your company excel at onboarding new employees or are you constantly running behind the process with forms, playing catch up? An HRMS can become the cornerstone of onboarding activities through effective planning and integration. Does your HRMS and its processes make the grade? Here are some top tips on how an integrated system can improve the efficiency and quality of onboarding processes.

Standardize Your Onboarding Process

When there are multiple possibilities to complete a process or workarounds exist, managers or employees will gravitate to the easiest one. If you lock down the process and only allow a standard process for onboarding activities, you can improve efficiencies and minimize the ‘one-off’ situations or personal handling that needs to occur because certain parts of various processes are used, rather than one robust and holistic approach through HRMS onboarding. Make the HRMS the foundation of employee onboarding each and every time to drive efficiency gains.

HRMS Can Proactively Drive the Onboarding Process

Often we find that managers and HR don’t have the required information to complete a task, or are unaware of the deadlines. If you have a strong HRMS onboarding process, you can make such tasks as easy as possible. For example, if social security number is needed one week prior to the payroll run for new hires, generating an automatic message from the HRMS to the responsible HR partner well in advance will be a better option than a payroll person running an audit report and sending an email to the HR partner to contact the new employee at the last minute.

Self-Service Access for the New Hire

Some HRMS onboarding modules allow for the option to provide a new employee with access to the system, through self-service, in advance of a start date. In doing so, the HRMS can collect the required payroll data in advance, as well as starting to collect optional data such as education or allow for on-boarding training prior to a start date, to allow the employee to hit the ground running on day one.

Integration with Other Systems

Does your company have multiple systems and forms that need to be completed for a new hire? Consider integrations or automated emails from the HRMS to the security system to start the process to issue a badge and parking permit, as well as to the financial system to set the employee up for expenses or any other extra systems.

Heather Batyski

About the author…

Heather is an experienced HRMS analyst, consultant and manager. Having worked for companies such as Deloitte, Franklin Templeton and Oracle, Heather has first-hand experience of many HRMS solutions including Peoplesoft and Workday.